By Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow

On March 21st Mexicans celebrate the birthday of Benito Juárez. Nowadays, his picture is usually found next to the Virgin’s in family shrines in Mexico.

President of Mexico from 1858 to 1872, Juárez was a liberal and the first head of state who managed to create some sort of stability in the country during a very agitated century.

However, this is not the primary reason why the president is revered.

Benito Júarez was the first Native American to rise to the pinnacle of power since Moctezuma, and the first to do so in the Western hemisphere since the arrival of Columbus. This is undoubtedly significant in a country that was – and remains – predominantly native and mestizo.

The Zapotec Indian-born Juárez was orphaned at age three and did not speak Spanish until he was twelve. He surmounted impossible odds to become Mexico’s president, like working as a domestic servant to pay his way through law school and climbing his way up Mexico’s social ladder.

Since the 19th century, Latin American and Caribbean history has been dominated by almost continual strife between European criollos and disenfranchised mestizos, mulattos and natives, who fought for their rights and for recognition. Benito Juárez was a groundbreaker.

Unfortunately, while he did create some stability, he did not find the exact formula. It took the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, and 900,000 deaths until the Mexican government found a solution to their chronic instability.

But the Mexican Revolution sparked a new Mexican identity that would turn Juárez into a veritable cult figure. While Argentines were following the French’s fine arts tradition and other European vogues, Mexicans embraced the mystical exaltation of the Indian peasant and the mestizo urban proletariat. In the process, Mexico began generating completely unique and original works in the visual arts (like mural art) and in cinema.

This cultural development resulting from the Mexican Revolution helped spread the exultation of the “mestizo” identity even further. In the 1920s, the government began investing immensely in libraries, theaters, museums and radio programs. It put in place a vast education system with the hope of creating a single Mexican identity out of Mexico’s mixed population of criollos, Indios and mestizos.

Mexican official culture shifted abruptly from hispanidad (Hispanicity) to americanismo. In the 1920s, Mexico established itself as the most representative Spanish American republic, a home of cultural nationalism and latinoamericanismo.

Only the Spanish Civil War and Cuban Revolution can compare with the impact of the Mexican Revolution on Hispanic art, culture and thought since the 1920s.

The intellectual figure who captured the essence of this shift was José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), rector of the National University in 1919 and minister of education in 1921. As a statesman, Vasconcelos was responsible for creating the Mexican education system and establishing its public libraries – he is the one who first commissioned Diego Rivera’s giant murals.

Vasconcelos expressed his strong americanista point of view in his major work, La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race), published in 1925. Contrary to what the title suggests, Vasconcelos’ work was not science fiction; it was the cornerstone of indigenismo (the celebration of ancient indigenous cultural heritage). In his introduction, Vasconcelos writes: “We will come, in the Americas before anywhere else in the world, to the creation of a race made from the treasures of all of those before, a final race, a cosmic race.”

Vasconcelos’ wrote La Raza Cósmica to give the oppressed (the mestizo and the Indians) reasons to be proud. In his essay, he also expressed the ideology of universally progressing as a “fifth race” despite factors of race, territory and spirituality.

In other words, Vasconcelos pushed the mystical adulation of the mestizo identity to its extreme, and Benito Juárez – retroactively — became its embodiment.

More information about the development of Spanish in Latin America can be found in our new book, The Story of Spanish, to be released in May 2013, St. Martin’s Press.

Suddenly Home EIGHT: Beginning of the Day Rituals (or why it's so important to put off going to work a little every day...)

In my decades listening to friends talk about their jobs, I’ve noticed people like to get to work as quickly as possible.

Morning commutes aren’t joy rides, I get that. But what people who work outside the home might not realize – that is, until they join the home office tribe – is that it's not all bad. Going to work gives them time to get used to the idea of … going to work.

People who travel to work have a buffer zone before getting into performance mode: they get to wake up, eat breakfast, drink coffee, shower, get dressed, commune with their kids (or pets) and then walk, bike, drive or bus to their destination. It’s a great excuse to listen to the radio, or read or listen to podcasts or just think about other things.

For us home workers, little of this applies. When you skip the transport and personal preparation part, which is not essential most days, we have a pretty skimpy morning routine and no built in time for a bit of day dreaming.

I never thought that was fair. Call it a self-designed buffer zone, or creatively putting off the inevitable, as a self-employed person, I have always thought I deserved to ease into the day just like everyone else.

Since I have still have children at home, the first chunk of my morning is boilerplate: I wake the kids up, make sure they eat, give them an excuse to roll their eyes at someone who asks stupid questions.

But when my girls are on the sidewalk heading to school, I do not head straight to the office. I am usually in the living room reading my assortment of newspapers.

Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I have created some kind of morning ritual that combines coffee, newsprint and sweat. Many mornings I do a Pilates workout while listening to the news. In different times and places, I have gone on a regular morning walk, or even a ski in nearby Parc Maisonneuve.

This means getting up earlier than required by the 40-hour week, but it’s worth it. Being able to switch out a commute for morning exercise is probably the greatest advantage of working at home.

Whatever you feel like doing, I’d recommend some kind of pre-work ritual to anyone who works at home. You might not be doing this forever, but it’s probably not going to be over soon. Being in automatic pilot for the first hour or so of the day helps you feel normal and ignore the eternal question of whether you really want to work at all. (In my case, it also lets the creative juices start flowing.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work and I usually wake up with ideas and projects. But that doesn’t mean I always feel like executing them. I wouldn’t go as far to claim a morning routine make you a better worker. It just helps you get to work without wondering if you really want to be there.

In my last post (Keeping the Kids at a Distance) I mentioned how my husband and I have learned to give our daughters the run the house during our work hours.

We just ignore the collateral damage until the end of the day. It’s the only way to keep our parenting duties (all but the essential ones) from dragging us away from work.

In an earlier post I also explained why you have to stake out physical territory to keep your concentration.

You need to protect your professional mindset as well.

In my experience, any activity related to cleaning or organizing household items is a direct threat to work. Sound paradoxical? Cleaning up craft supplies, filling the dishwasher and folding laundry seem like useful activities to squeeze into work hours, but they’re not. When you are trying to work, they are distractions.

If you don’t put housework off until you leave the office, it will suck the life out of your workday.

It might be the hardest thing to ignore, but everyone working at home has to resist the siren call of the kitchen sink. I might be hardcore, but I also avoid filling the dishwasher.

If you are new at the home office, you have seen just how fast the pile grows when you cook three meals at home. For those of working with kids at home, this has become to be infinitely harder. Because even when kids or teenagers occupy themselves during the day, they eat.

Still, even though the stack of dishes has reached a new scale, from Monday to Friday, we let it grow until we clock out of the office. Same goes for everything else lying around the house. When I see open paperback novels, pens, erasers, markers, USB keys and phone chargers littering my living space, I just move on until I get “home from work.”

One trick I have for avoiding the housework trap is to make sure whatever else I do during the day has a beginning and an end. Like a walk. Or a cup of coffee. We all know housework is a bottomless well. Starting chores in the middle of the day is like jumping down the rabbit hole with a rag and a bottle of bleach.

If I’m not making coffee, eating lunch or catering to another essential need, I try to leave the premises for a break. Yes, that was easier a month ago when it was still legal to step off our front porch. But even quick walk around the block is better than sliding down the slippery slope of housework.

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